so based on the call above, can you help me figure out how to identify exactly WHAT class/method is being called within this step? That way I can try to trace through the various classes inside the multiple .JAR files that I have decompiled and tried to figure out on my own (but it is WAY too big a task to tackle that way; I need to know what to focus on).

Am I correct in presuming that "dbca.rsp" is where will will be stored the RESULTS of this function call? (the "response file") ... so which is the "INPUT", would that be "ORATAB"? If so, where would the details of that call (or list of calls) be stored?

Many things are "possible" the real problem here is that since it is within an Oracle-provided "JumpStartKit" it is a completely "automated" installation of multiple products, so I can not step in and modify any of those steps.

My guess is that I am encountering an issue with the Oracle DB installation step (specifically, the instance configuration) which is NOT unique to the Portal setup (or the Portal JSK) -- it seems to be an issue others have encountered (or very similar) when installing Oracle Database.

When it occurs for others, maybe it isn't always at 87% (since I did not find many results in Google) but it definitely HAS happened to others during the Oracle DB install.

Sadly, the only "recommendation" I have seen anywhere is "it's probably out of memory so just add more RAM, increase Swap File, WAIT FOR IT TO FINISH".

I have tried all 3. Nearly a DOZEN TIMES. Still no luck.

I will try to pull up the file "dbca.rsp" tomorrow, a bit too busy today with other things though. Thanks for continuing to try to help...

I found the kit various ways, including from the WebCenter Portal page as well as an Oracle blog post (2 of them, actually) ... but the same source link comes up however you get there -- easily findable via Google:

Oracle WebCenter Portal Jump Start Kit

The Jump Start Kit (JSK) for WebCenter Portal is a utility that installs a fully functional version of WebCenter Portal pre-integrated with Oracle WebCenter Content, including key features enabled and preconfigured, all within a single machine instance (virtual or physical). The JSK supports Linux x86-64. It also includes a series of templates, examples, and lesson guides to walk you through a series of typical use cases. It is targeted to developers or product evaluation only, and is not supported for production use.

Since on a clean install one of the dbprereq tests comes back with this failure: "The localhost is not mapped to a valid IP address in Hosts file" I then added a line to the end of my "/etc/hosts" file:

echo "$(hostname -I) $(hostname)">>/etc/hosts

I verified that the above is of course the same as manually adding this line: 10.0.2.15 mytest

I then verified that I can now ping my machine name, getting that 10. IP address.

So it's unlikely to be any kind of network/http issue.

After repeatedly getting "stuck" at 87%, I then tried with OL5 (thinking that maybe some of my package versions were "too new" and thus causing problems) then I went and tried AGAIN back in OL6 (once I had the same problem, getting stuck at 87% of database instance configuration).

I even got DESPERATE after all the same results with various attempts. I grabbed the Portal 11.1.1.7 SOA virtual machine image...

It's like 15gb total, after you grab all the separate files and combine them and convert the image inside VirtualBox :whew:

The result is a VirtualBox image that has a BUNCH of servers already installed and configured (as listed above), and Portal 11.1.1.7 is running which I verified ... and then I just deleted a bunch of folders to make HD space and then I ran the Portal JSK over top of that (since the whole reason for my task is try out some new things in Oracle Portal 11.1.1.*8* ). Still the same issue.

So I'm kinda feeling like I've hit a wall here.

Below is the aforementioned "dbca.rsp" file (in its entirety). Good luck, hope it helps...

So are you saying that it's a common issue? Does it "resolve itself" just by leaving it alone for an hour or two, or is there something that needs to be enabled/configured/modified when it happens? And what is the common CAUSE of this hanging issue in Windows (and why only in Windows and rarely in Linux?)

After repeatedly getting "stuck" at 87%, I then tried with OL5 (thinking that maybe some of my package versions were "too new" and thus causing problems) then I went and tried AGAIN back in OL6 (once I had the same problem, getting stuck at 87% of database instance configuration).

Thanks for pointing out that non-certified*** issue though -- it would have been nice if the 11.1.1.8 JSK was made available as an already-built VirtualBox image (like the other one I mentioned) but if not then at LEAST suggest how to get a clean Linux installation with the proper packages installed in advance of actually RUNNING the jsk installer.

With OL5 it was extra challenging because although the packages were easier to make up-to-date (without making them a "higher" version) the JAVA version in OL5 was too low for the jsk to run; it took a LOT of work for me to figure out how to update Java in Linux (having zero Linux experience before taking on this task of evaluating Portal 11.1.1.8) ... once I got the Java version up to 1.7 the jsk installation ran -- but got stuck at the same 87% location as with OL6.

My RECOMMENDATION if you can speak to the right people within Oracle: make a RUNNING VirtualBox image available for Portal 11.1.1.8 -- since it is so signficantly improved over 1.1.1.7 in terms of some UI improvements and especially customizations. (I am ridiculously persistent and love learning new things, most others who might want to evaluate Portal would not take as much time to figure things out and try and retry things ; and even *I* am at the point of giving up of the product now since there is no easy way of getting it running to evaluate it).

*** also it isn't exactly clear to the average visitor to the JSK webpage that the most current version of *ORACLE* Linux is NOT going to work with the jsk, it would not be something you would expect!

Requirements

The minimum requirements are for a physical or virtual machine running Linux with minimum 10GB of RAM available. The supported operating system versions are Oracle Linux (all versions supported by the software) and RedHat Linux (all versions supported by the software). The versions supported mirror that of WebCenter Portal based on the latest WebLogic Server. Before performing any installation, you must read Oracle Fusion Middleware System Requirements and Specifications and Oracle Fusion Middleware Supported System Configurations to ensure that your environment meets the minimum installation requirements for the products you are installing. Both of these documents are available on

I wonder if Oracle Linux 6 is actually INCOMPATIBLE with Portal 11.1.1.8? I would actually be really surprised if it is! In other words, I highly doubt that Oracle would release a "Jump Start Kit" for a significantly-improved version of a product that ONLY ran on a 5+ year old version of their operating system offering (but not on the most recent version of the OS, even the 3 year old version) ...

...so, no new responses for a few days, I take it that means there's nothing else anyone can advise? Am I basically stuck here, until Oracle comes out with an already-built VM for Portal JumpStartKit 11.1.1.8?

Just to quell your suspicions about installing the JSK on OL6 (even though it has been mentioned that is not *officially* supported), I did successfully install it on OL6.5 (easily). Just a standard "Basic Server" install, used the oracle-rdbms-server-11gR2-preinstall package, did the usual oracle user/group creation, and went from there.

The answer (or at least some indication to what it causing the problem) has to be in one of the logs in /opt/oracle/portal/db/cfgtoollogs/dbca/orcl... not sure which one to recommend (either orcl.log or trace.log, best guess).

The only difference between our two configurations is that I set swap space equal to RAM size (12GB). I've done this for years, as Oracle (DB) used to give me problems if swap space wasn't greater than or equal to RAM size.

Thanks foxnet; I always chose "Desktop" install because although I am learning some of the basic Linux commands I would much prefer using graphical interface for many common recurring tasks. I doubt that would be the reason for me failing and you succeeding though (I always added an extra swap file to make the total swap be approx. = to the RAM , i.e. 12GB RAM, around 12.5 GB swap -- although watching the System Monitor the whole time the RAM was never fully utilized so the swap file was never touched, so I always doubted that could be the issue).

I suspect it is a network/communication issue during the database instance configuration step -- when I installed OL5 and OL6 I just gave it a hostname like "myhost" and then added a line to /etc/hosts/ with the hard-coded IP address, for example

10.1.2.3 myhost

But when I *ran* the JSK installer, I did not include the optional "HTTP" value because I wanted the OUI to do its default -- can you provide for me what your command you used for running the JSK installer?

^ PS: All of my permissions are fine (i.e. all the expected log files and unzipped folders etc. are written out without any problems)

Also when you chose OL6 that means you did not need to install any additional packages (other than oracle-rdbms-server-11gR2-preinstall ) , correct? Or, can you tell me which extra packages you installed (before or after the 11gR2-preinstall) -- perhaps just to get the VirtualBox Extensions to work correctly?

Personally I may have installed "too many" additional packages, perhaps that caused problems. Can you confirm that all I would need are these?

If only #1 and #2 are needed to get the JSK installer to work successfully, great! Maybe it *is* the fact that I am in the Desktop instead of just Basic Server But if not, which packages in #3 do you recommend?

I am willing to give it another shot, with OL6 (otherwise I gotta upgrade Java :sigh: )

Below is my kickstart file -- maybe you can try using it, and then we can rule out configuration issues. After doing the kickstart, all I do is copy over the install files (actually, I have them on a separate vmdk that I just mount), and:

If you want to do a desktop install, uncomment text, skipx, and the desktop packages (I added some comments around that part), and it should work fine. Don't worry about the VBox extensions until you have a successfully running JSK.

WOW, foxnet, you are a life saver! ["Correct Answer" marked ... but the fun is not quite over...]

I got back from 2 weeks of vacation and eventually got back to this task ... and although it was a challenge figuring out exactly HOW to get a Linux kickstart to work, figure it out I did.

(Strangely, the "%post" section did not seem to launch -- but not a big deal, I just manually did each command step-by-step. All of the packages seemed to install automagically before I saw my first command prompt though.)

So I figured out how to build a VDI containing just the 10gb of installer .ZIP files, figured out how to mount it, etc. etc. and FINALLY TODAY AT 12:30pm I clicked ENTER with my "runme" command. And color me shocked but it actually INSTALLED all the way, by about 3:45pm the final Step 22 of 22 completed! Pinch me I must be dreaming! The servers appeared to all shut down on their own and then restart in order and the UCM index got rebuilt and all servers seem to be running! (unbelievable excitement here, since I had all but given up before your post above).

So I immediately wanted to confirm each of the services are actually running -- since I'm in text-only land in a Linux server environment I decided to just use "wget" to grab a local copy of the .html being served, and then before I used "cat" I did a quick search to remember the name of the text web browser "links" so I used THAT to glance at each ".html" file ... confirmed, they seem to have the expected text contents.

***

the fun is not quite over:

So my final challenge (and request of you) is ... how do I let my Windows 7 host "see" the services running in my Linux guest within VirtualBox?

***

When I go to the direct IP address for the Linux guest from within my HOST (Windows 7) it says "Connecting..." but never finishes. So I did my best to confirm the port 7777 is open in my guest (via netstat , maybe that is not the best way?) ... I expect the ports are fine on the guest since I succeeded with the above "wget" attempts ...So now what?

From my initial research, it seems that it is best to use Bridged Networking ( https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch06.html#network_bridged ) and that means I need to shut down my guest VM in order to change network settings... so >>> how do I safely/elegantly tell the entire Portal JSK collection of servers to shut down, in order, nicely and neatly (and can I presume they will all start back up nicely when I restart my Linux VM?) <<< ... I decided to "Save State" for the guest VM right now, until I hear from you and your wisdom since you might be the only other person on this forum who has succeeding in getting the 11.1.1.8 PortalJSK to actually install and start!